AI – Smart Magic for Clever People

This entry is tangentially related to David Regal’s new tarot deck. But not entirely. Perhaps not even legitimately. I currently have a question pending on the Vanishing Inc. website which may prove that my fears are unfounded. This time.

Indeed the last time I was super concerned about a technological innovation it was NFTs and despite my fears only one magician ever released an NFT project to my knowledge, and it was so hilariously bad that he sold none of them and pivoted to passive income training course scams.

But with the launch of Phill Smiths Fusion Mosaic Phenomenon and Marc Kerstein’s Subliminal the dawn of the AI generated magic product has truly begun.

Continue reading “[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches”

Whether or not you realise it, there is a battle going on for the creative hearts and minds of our world. The enemy is everywhere, invisibly leaking into our unconscious psyche. Sure sometimes you can spot it, a non contiguous limbs with too many joints, a fucked up hand where the fingers blur into one, a face that is way too symmetrical until it isn’t. But by carefully pruning these defects the visible results get more and more uncanny.
The efforts of our greatest creative minds are being tipped into a huge digital mincing machine and ground down into sloppy joes, which are then somehow re-crystalized into not just prime wagu beef but whole living cows, making genuine farming unsustainable as a career and banishing agrarian culture to the past.

Sorry this metaphor got away from me somewhat.

I am of course speaking about Dall-E Stable Diffusion, and the whole AI art phenomenon. I can’t draw, so I’m going to leave that whole discussion to people who can, and are having their work and livelihoods stolen outright by this process. I do however like to write, and AI has been after my turf as well, in the form of the General Text Prediction algorithm, the latest incarnation of which is ChatGPT.

And readers I’m sad to say I used it… And I liked it.

Continue reading “The Book of Lore
or How I learned to stop worrying and love ChatGPT”